Constitutional Revolutions: The People, the Text, and the Hermeneutic of Legitimation

Howard Schweber

The term “constitutional revolution” is remarkably hard to specify, as a number of recent authors have demonstrated. For one thing, discussions sometimes conflate the question of definition—what is a constitutional revolution?—with the question of what counts as evidence to demonstrate that such a revolution has occurred. For another, the term “revolution” is used to mean an upheaval, but it contains etymological reference to earlier theories that treated political revolution as a reversal or cyclical motion of the wheel of history. “Revolution” is, of course, the noun form of the verb “revolve,” and describes the turning of a wheel. Classical historical theorists from Polybius to Machiavelli and neo-Aristotelian writers such as Ibn Khaldun presented variations on the idea that history proceeds in cycles. Political upheavals and reversals of orders of dominance represent the turning of the wheel. The idea of revolution of reversal is captured nicely in the title of a song from the Puritan Revolution in England, “The World Turned Upside Down.” But how are we to decide when a change in the distribution of powers among the branches of government, for example, signifies such a reversal rather than just a rearrangement?